Yesterday I posted a diary - Mark Sumner is Almost Right: It's Reason vs. Faith - in which I argued that while fear was, as Mark had suggested, an important weapon in the GOP arsenal, the real battle going on in the United States is between reason and faith.
I explained that by "faith" I did not necessarily mean religious faith, nor did I mean all faith, but rather unreasoning faith that persists in the face of contradictory evidence. (Also, I was responding perhaps overly alliteratively to Mark's "reason vs. fear.") Even so, some commentators took issue with the term. So I would like to re-explore this topic from a slightly different perspective:
The 2010 election is a battle between reason and revelation.
Revelation is, of course, a term with religious origins, and is generally used in a religious context, that is, as the revealed word of God. In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the proclaimed divine origin of the revealed word means that it is difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to question any part of it. Among other things, this makes it very convenient for people who claim that their authority, their political or temporal power, derives from this same revealed word. Not for nothing was it called "the divine right of kings."
In Europe during the Middle Ages, revelation - more precisely, the Catholic Church's interpretation of the revealed word - was the source of authority for the Vatican's claim to grant legitimacy to secular power. To protect that authority, the Church insisted that revelation was superior to reason, supreme over all human thought, and it met any challenge to that revelation with all the weapons at its disposal, including execution.
This is a political diary, not a history lesson, so I am not going to get into the centuries-long struggle between the Church and the princes of Europe. Suffice it to say that out of that struggle, and the struggle of scientists and philosophers to pursue their investigations wherever they met lead, eventually arose the ideas that make up the Enlightenment, which held, as a basic principle, the supremacy of reason over revelation.
This principle is at the heart of the American system of government. The Founding Fathers were well-read in the Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Rousseau,and they wrote the Constitution with the intent that, as much as possible, laws and policies would be the product of reasoned debate. They even added the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment to make it explicit that revelation, in the form of some religion's interpretation of a divinely authored text, had no place in the formulation of law.
Ever since the Constitution was ratified, there has been resistance to its establishment of reason over revelation. Up until now, this has meant religious revelation, and all such attempts have ultimately been defeated, even if they have been temporarily successful. Prohibition is one example. Or look at the battle over Proposition 8; it is a battle between reason (Judge Walker subjected all of the proponents' claims to the test of reason and found them wanting) and revelation ("God doesn't like gays.") The principle of the supremacy of reason over revelation dictated the judge's ruling that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. (And those Supreme Court justices who will try to overturn that ruling will have to find some argument based on reason, even though their motives may be religious.)
But now we are witnessing a new political phenomenon: The Republican party is dropping all pretense at reason and is claiming authority using the trappings and techniques of revelation. In other words, when Palin or Boehner or Bachman, when Limbaugh and Beck, when Angle and Rand Paul, make a statement, their words are not subject to inspection, to challenge, to factual analysis. In effect, they are delivering a secular revelation.
While the First Amendment's prohibition on mixing religion and politics is under heavy assault, it still commands the respect of much of the electorate, so while Palin and many of the others undoubtedly have religious motives for their ideas, they are being careful not to play those up overmuch. (One reason Angle is losing votes in Nevada is that she talked too much about her religious motives.) The manufactured controversy over the Islamic cultural center is part of this calculated assault, but it is noteworthy that most Americans believe the Muslims have a Constitutional right to build that center (even though a majority also believe they shouldn't).
Although the GOP is therefore careful in its references to religion, it is definitely adopting the same techniques that the Catholic Church used in the Middle Ages: a claim to revealed truth that reason is forbidden to examine. It is the same technique, writ large, that Joe McCarthy used when he waved a sheet of paper in the Senate chamber that he claimed was a list of communists in the State Department - a list he never allowed anyone to look at. It is the same mentality that allowed Bush to claim he knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and refused to allowed Congress to see his "evidence." Sharron Angle now refuses to talk to reporters unless they are willing to only those questions she is willing to answer - a kind of political catechism.
It is not yet a complete revelation, secular or otherwise, because there is as yet no established doctrine, no revealed text, as it were, beyond a few "sacred" principles such as "Wealth good, taxes bad"; "the United States can do no wrong"; "conservatives right, liberals traitors" and similar bumper sticker slogans. But it is instructive to note that already the Teabaggers are tearing themselves apart in doctrinal disputes that are fast coming to resemble early Christian fights over the divine versus the human nature of Jesus.
Nonetheless, the Republican tactic is creating an existential crisis for our Constitutional system of government: While it is using the forms of religion in claiming the supremacy of its revelation over reason, it is concealing its connection to religion. But the Constitutional establishment of the supremacy of reason over revelation never contemplated a secular version of revelation.
Further complicating the picture is the diminishing quality of education in this country; too much of the electorate has never had any training in critical thinking - the basic tool of reason. This leaves them vulnerable both to the fulminations of Christian fundamentalism and deceits of the GOP.
Having described the problem facing the Democrats (and reasonable citizens generally), and being myself a reasonable person, I am somewhat at a loss to propose a tactic to counter it. I would like to think that enough of the electorate still has enough respect for reason that an appeal to reason will succeed, but I would not care to bet our future on it (and we are betting our future on this election). I also dislike fighting demagoguery with counter-demagoguery, though it may come to that. So let me end with this thought (subject to updates): What is clear is that the Democrats cannot meet this assault on reason with fear and timidity - and that, all too often, is what they have been doing.